


the reject queen

by theformerone



Category: Naruto
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2020-11-22 06:55:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20870045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theformerone/pseuds/theformerone
Summary: "The Fūji suzuhan are real bitches this time of year," she says, gesturing to the bell shaped lily. Shino smiles discreetly behind the high neck of his shirt.Or, the one where Shino transplants a new queen to the Yamanaka's private hives.





	the reject queen

The Yamanaka compound is resplendent in the early autumn. The clan prides itself on its history as botanists, how this helped them forge their alliances with the Nara and the Akimichi. While the Nara used their herbal knowhow to treat the physical body, the Yamanaka were the first and largest clan that used their knowledge to destroy it. They were the best purveyors of poisons in the Warring States Era. It made them plenty of money; the remedies the Nara made gave them a pretty penny as well. 

Shino knows this because the Aburame have had a truce with the Yamanaka for some time. A mutually beneficial agreement. The Aburame would use their kikaichū and their general mastery of entomology to help tend to the Yamanaka flowers, and the Aburame got part of the Yamanaka's secret medicinal honey, as well as a regular feeding ground for the other larger insects that lived on the Aburame estate. 

It has been Shino's responsibility to take care of the Aburame bees ever since Torune left. Shino hasn't minded the extra effort. The Aburame bees are prized Ōkuninushi honeybees, a partial hive found on the sloping neck of a volcano and carried carefully back to the estate. Ōkuninushi honeybees were prized not only for their honey, prized because of its rarity and the danger of reaching it, but also because they were one of the few species of civilian insects that could successfully interbreed with kikaichū. 

Only the clan elders had incorporated the honeybees into their personal hives, and that took the concentration and cultivation that only an elder _could _devote to it. Despite the possibility, there was still a great deal that could go wrong. Kikaichū queen bees were known to eat many of the Ōkuninushi drones before she had laid enough eggs to sustain the population.

Shino was probably the single most patient person in his _year_, and the task felt gargantuan to him. Testing the chakra networks of the eggs, blighting the underdeveloped so only the strong survive, cultivating the stronger branches, making sure the gene pool is diverse enough that hives don't collapse from interbreeding. 

When the Ōkuninushi kikaichū breed was perfected (and that was still a long time coming; maybe by the time Shino's grandkids are his age now), the bees would sting with poison, and their bodies would secrete a kind of toxic wax that could instigate famines, and with even more care -- reverse them. 

It made a bit of sense, why the Yamanaka would be interested in the rare bees as well. Mostly for the sake of their little bodies, which had been ancestrally nourished by rich volcanic soil, making them perfect little purifiers for the nectar they collected. 

The Ōkuninushi queen Shino has on him is named Mifuyu, because she survived a winter blight that wiped out half of her colony. A number of her daughters had been introduced to the elder's hives. She was only eleven months old, and October was warm in Konohagakure right up until the middle of the month when the heat broke in half with a shrug.

The air was always heavy with pollen in the Yamanaka compound; Mifuyu would do well there. Shino breathed in heavy through his nose as the gate to the garden opened from behind. Ino poked her head out, a smear of dirt from her cheek to her chin, up to her elbows in dirt. 

"You're early!" she says, surprised. 

Shino nods. 

"I wanted to be sure there was extra time at the end of our appointment, in case something went wrong for the first several hours. Do you mind the additional intrusion?"

Ino shrugs her shoulder, and uses her shoulder to open the gate the rest of the way. Her usual long skirt is replaced with a pair of thick, well worn dark grey corduroys; her sleeveless purple turtleneck was looser, its throat baggier, like the one she had worn in their genin days.

Her feet were bare. Her toenails were painted a bright blue. So were her fingernails, though her hands were smeared in brown. 

"The Fūji suzuhan are real bitches this time of year," she says, gesturing to the bell shaped lily. Shino smiles discreetly behind the high neck of his shirt. They were heavy and red as cranberries, their stamens slightly darker, then a shocking blue at the anthers. "They don't like the soil in this patch of garden so they've decided to die very suddenly and dramatically in this section, and start _eating _the beggar's peony from the root up."

Shino nodded appropriately. He handled the Yamanaka hives when they needed assistance, but generally speaking, the clan's own general knowledge of beekeeping handled pretty much everything aside from the young queen Shino was now introducing to them. 

Besides, Ino was regularly in and out of the garden. She had taken up a poison's apprenticeship with Kato Shizune, the Godaime's niece, and was had been using her own duties in her clan's private garden to further her own study. It was common for Shino to see her there on the few times he arrived to take care of emergencies, and to bring ailing Aburame bees for feasts to bring them back to their health. 

"Is that her?" she asks, shutting the gate and peering over her shoulder to the cage in Shino's hand. Shino nods once. Ino smiles. 

"What's her name?"

"Mifuyu -- ,"

"-- Why is that?" she interjects, mischief glittering behind her eyes as she says it before he can say --,

"Because her first winter decimated half of her colony. She was one of the few survivors, and her next was twice as large before we had to start transferring it apart."

Ino smiles, her back to the door, still looking at the cage. Her hair is pulled back and her bangs are clipped all the way back to her ear with solid black bands. She licks the salt of her sweat off her lip, narrowly missing the stripe of dirt marring her face. Shino notices from behind his glasses, rolls his lips together, says nothing. 

"Can I see you introduce her to the others?" 

"If that is what you would like to do."

Ino looks back up at him and gives him a bright grin. The autumn light hits her with a warmth that makes her hair glow like the dying sun is lighting her up from within, like the bees and butterflies that float through the garden around her head make up a circlet,

"I'm all yours."

* * *

It's only the first day, so they can't do much except introduce the portion of the younger bees to the Ōkuninushi queen so that they get used to her pheromones. The older bees had already been returned to the parent colony by the Yamanaka themselves. They had prepared everything before Shino arrived, including a beesuit, that he politely refused. 

Ino seemed just as non-bothered without one. The young bees from Mifuyu's new colony buzzed up around her cheek, searching her hair for flowers. She doesn't bother moving them away even though there are quite a few there. She shrugs a shoulder when she catches him looking. 

"We make all our own shampoo on the compound," she explains, not surprising Shino at all. The makings of soaps and perfumes was a reasonable extension of the Yamanaka's abilities as master poisoners. "Plus I've been hanging around in the lillies and the peonies all day."

Shino nods at a small cluster of bees bumping their little heads against Ino's hands, rolling over her fingers in delight when they get between them. 

"It appears as though might be able to get something off of you."

Ino chuckles, holding her fingers up so the bees can drudge up whatever pollen is leftover on her hands or at her elbows, or at the spindly sweet bush clover smell of her hair. 

"They'll have to work for it."

The bees can't access Mifuyu physically yet, but a great number of them do investigate the cage from the outside. They can smell not only that she is a queen, but that she is very foreign. Her rarity is her greatest strength. Even if this colony rejected Mifuyu, she could survive alone without one for upwards of a month. She was Fire Country, and so a cousin of the breed the Yamanaka owned, and so not so strange that interbreeding would be impossible. 

The successful years of kikaichū breeding had swayed the minds of the Yamanaka; they had wanted to see the more difficult task done before the simpler one was conquered. It made sense to Shino. 

"D'you think she'll live long?" Ino asks. A number of the bees have abandoned her hair to buzz around Mifuyu's cage. 

"She is only eleven months and fourteen days old, and her lifespan in the natural world around be around three years. In Aburame care, she could live to roughly three years and eighteen months. Without a hive, her chances are less favorable than they were before the winter killed a portion of her colony. But because she is very resilient, I think she will live through the next year." 

Ino purses her lips; Shino can tell from the way she hovers that she wants to stick her fingers in the cave and touch the Ōkuninushi queen. Shino has. They're a darker shade of yellow, and the queens are nearly the color of burnished gold. They had a peculiar ash-colored pattern of spots on their wings, used to confuse their predators when volcanic ash would drop from the skies above their hives. 

"Legends say a spoonful Ōkuninushi honey can pull the fever out of a child, from in the mouth to out again," Ino murmurs, crouching to get a good look at the Yamanaka bees interacting with their bewitching new queen. 

"The autumn has a few warm weeks left," Shino says, body turned toward where the hive is exploring, eyes on where a few bees buzz above Ino's blue fingernails where her hands perch on her knees. One touches down and rests its wings for a minute there. Ino doesn't move an inch. "That's enough time for her to at least lay one round of roughly four or five thousand bees before the frost makes them huddle together."

Ino's eyes widen, and as she opens her mouth (with the barest tint of pink in it, because Shino knows Ino also makes her own lip balm; Shino's known because he's seen her in the garden before, collecting berries from bushes to sweeten the wax) to interrupt him, Shino says -- , 

"Why?" And it's worth it to see Ino laugh again. "Because Ōkuninushi queens lay twice the number of eggs as the Fire Country bees that are native to this area. Mifuyu is half kikaichū, but is sterile in terms of creating more kikaichū. All of her young will be exceptionally strong Ōkuninushi honeybees. This is why she was chosen to join the Yamanaka hives."

"Ah," Ino says, nodding at the bees in front of her. She rises slowly to her feet, and smirks when she says, "So you gave us the reject queen, huh?" 

Shino's brow lifts minutely. 

"In so many words," he swallows, his throat slightly and suddenly dry, "yes."

Ino lifts her fingers and blows the bees away from them, and walking over to Shino. She bumps her hip against his as she passes, gets awful satisfied looking when Shino rolls with the motion instead of stiffly letting her hit him. 

"Then let's get you some scraps for those feral fucking beetles of your father's," she offers, nodding her head toward the garden and the sprawling orchard it connects through after a brief detour through a finely manicured karesansui. "We've got some late peaches and stubborn figs, some plums, too. I'll throw in the last of the dead beggar's peony for a salad for them."

Shino blinks. 

"That's very kind of you." 

Ino glances at him over her shoulder, already stepping back into the warm light, barefoot through the grass and over the warm stone. 

"I know it is," she says, voice lilting a bit like she's singing it instead. 

The insistent hum of his own kikaichū blurs against the sound of the Yamanaka bees meeting their new (reject) queen (as Ino had affectionately called her. If Hinata were here, she would smile at him in that way of hers, all dreamy and sincerely satisfied on his behalf. If Kiba was here to see it, he'd say the bees were like little hearts bouncing out of his head and bumping into each other. 

"Are you coming or not?" 

She doesn't look over her shoulder as she calls him. Shino snorts, but turns his feet to follow her, until he's walking just a step behind her as she picks up a basket and starts laying the fruit and the flowers together. 

A couple of bees follow them. (And Shino doesn't think that Kiba would be that wrong at all). 

**Author's Note:**

> i know nothing about bees/botany except for what ecosia told me; i just thought this idea was cute and ran with it.. if any real beekeepers/botanist read this fic, please feel free to correct me, and i'll revise the fic accordingly. 
> 
> the Fūju suzuhan is a flower i made up. it's a red lily of the valley, with the spider lily bits coming out of the bells. very pretty i think, and seasonal lmao. i pulled this rarepair out of a generator, so that's where this came from lol. thank u for reading!


End file.
